


When The Lights Are On

by storybycorey



Series: When The Lights Are Off [3]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Doggy Style, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:40:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24845437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storybycorey/pseuds/storybycorey
Summary: Third and final part in the When The Lights Are Off series.It’s late, almost 10:00, so with matching keys and a matching dysfunctional relationship, they bid each other goodnight, she with a lacy robe hidden deep within her suitcase, he with an adjoining door and her unspoken permission to use it.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Series: When The Lights Are Off [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1622194
Comments: 18
Kudos: 145





	When The Lights Are On

_A piece of you’s inside me, Mulder_ , she thinks, at least a dozen times a day. It’s been a week since that night, and though realistically she knows it’s impossible, she swears she can feel it. He nudges her elbow and she feels it. He hands her a coffee and she feels it. He opens the door, puts on his coat, carries her luggage to the car. She feels it— _him_ —inside her and she blushes.

Doesn’t matter though, whether she can feel him or not, because really, he’s miles and miles away. He’s on the other side of the office digging in his files, he’s clomping down the hall and onto the elevator, he’s halfway across town, lying in his own fucking bed in his own fucking apartment instead of beside her in hers.

She hates that she even cares.

She can do this though, she’s decided. When she looks at things logically, this _arrangement_ they’ve fallen upon is mutually beneficial. She’s meeting his needs, he’s meeting hers. Everyone’s happy.

When she looks at things _il_ -logically, that’s a load of bullshit and she knows it.

Melissa would laugh at how ill-equipped she’s become at handling relationships these days. Or _non_ -relationships. Or whatever the hell this is.

At night with the lights off she thinks of anything but him, anything but _a piece of you’s inside me, Mulder_. George Clooney, Brad Pitt, the guy from that movie she saw with her mother, the one with the jawline, the hair... _Them_ , she thinks of _them_. Them with their hands on her body, them whispering sweet nothings in her ear, only it’s all wrong, every damn time, and when she finally gives in it’s to memories of his grunts, it’s to the lingering scent of his cum on her skin.

A piece of him’s inside her. She’s terrified though, of how desperately she aches for the rest of him.

…

Their boarding passes read _Detroit,_ _Michigan_ this week. He offers her the aisle, and she ponders his motivations much too thoroughly for her own good. Their travel companion of late, with his poky white tusks, lurks just below, stuffed down in Baggage between tan American Tourister and beat-up blue Samsonite. 

They fly and they talk—about the case, about Michigan, about the irritating new A-24 form that Skinner now requires. They do not talk about fucking themselves together in her room last week.

 _What do you make of this finding here? Did you read the report from the sheriff I gave you?_ and oh by the way _Did you know that a piece of you’s still inside me, Mulder?_

He doesn’t know of course. The same way he doesn’t know she packed a new robe this trip, peachy-pink satin with lace on the edges. It’s hidden layers deep within the geology of her suitcase, beneath a stratum of work shirts and blazers.

She sweats just thinking about it.

It was stupid to pack it really. She won’t wear it. Wearing it would mean she wants this, that she _planned_ for it. Wearing it would mean admitting how badly she misses the heat of his tongue.

The pilot announces their descent and already she’s sure she’s losing her mind.

…

She pretends not to listen as he checks them into their motel, leafs through Detroit brochures while _Adjoining rooms if possible?_ slips from his lips. She wonders what would happen if adjoining rooms were in fact _not_ possible, whether she’d unlock her hall door before falling asleep.

It’s late, almost 10:00, so with matching keys and a matching dysfunctional relationship, they bid each other goodnight, she with a lacy robe hidden deep within her suitcase, he with an adjoining door and her unspoken permission to use it.

…

She doesn’t expect him that first night, doesn’t even know that she’d want him. She’s tired and cranky and hasn’t shaved her legs in days. 

That’s a lie; of course she’d still want him. 

But this game they play, this mutually beneficial arrangement of theirs, it’s a delicate thing. It doesn’t happen on the first night, not even on the second. It happens when the case gets hard, when the frustration and the emotions overwhelm them, not because she let him choose sports talk radio in the rental car instead of easy listening.

As she drifts off to sleep, she thinks of the robe in her bag, swears she still feels him inside her.

…

She shaves her legs the next morning. Only because she’s due. Or at least that’s what she tells herself, sliding over her knee and on up her thigh. It’s been since summer she’s shaved anywhere but her shins, a detail she pretends not to notice.

He’s late to her door, and she’s grumpy by the time he finally arrives, her need for caffeine outweighing his charcoal suit, the one he knows she likes because she told him last month. They stop in the lobby ( _hot_ _coffee for guests!_ ) then drive to the station in silence, save for her curse when he brakes too sharply, because _dammit Mulder, if I spill coffee on my suit, I’m killing you._

Two cups in and her grumpiness fails to lessen. Women are being murdered and that doesn’t help. She braces herself; it’s going to be a difficult week.

He follows her with his eyes all morning, while they speak with the sheriff, while they pore over crime-scene photos. He’s as over-protective as she’d expect him to be given the situation. It flusters her, him watching her like that, especially while he’s wearing that charcoal suit. This case is going to be hard enough as it is; his hovering won’t help. She snaps finally, tells him to _give her some goddamn space_ , but then pouts when he actually does. She flees, borrowed scrubs and the county morgue calling her name.

She doesn’t want to want him. Doesn’t want every out-of-town case to revolve around when he’ll come to her room next, _if_ he’ll come at all. Mutually beneficial arrangement or not, the mindfuck of this all is getting to her. She needs her mind unfucked thank you very much. Or maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she has no clue what the hell she needs. 

She cuts her first Y incision, remembers his lips at her breast.

Later in her room, she pulls on the robe out of spite, just to prove she’s still in control. Its silky sleeves slide along her arms, its lacy edges tickle at her freshly-shaven thighs. Not like he’ll come tonight anyway—his loss. 

Through their shared wall, there’s the tinny sound of a woman’s fake orgasm, a man’s equally fake answering grunts. _Bow chicka wow wow_ thrums against her headboard. It makes her wet and that pisses her off. It’s not fair, that everything he does affects her this way.

She ignores the throb between her legs as long as possible, but fifteen minutes in she gives up, dragging off the robe and tossing it across the room to land in her suitcase ( _three points_ his phantom voice cheers). She gets herself off to the muffled sounds of porn, to the thought of his hands and the deliciously dirty things she’s sure he’s doing with them.

…

The only suit worse than the charcoal one is the _slightly darker_ charcoal one, so he obviously shows up the next morning wearing that. _Two more murders during the night_ , he tells her, voice soft and fingers at her wrist. She closes her eyes, wonders whether she could hide out in her closet all day, stuffed between a big, gray elephant and the motel’s complimentary dry-cleaning bag.

They ride to the sheriff’s office in silence. They’ve watched each other come, but with two dead women awaiting them, there’s nothing to say.

There are times she wonders what her life has become—days spent among the dead and nights spent trying desperately to feel alive. She feels sometimes like the ouroboros on her back, feeding off herself in order to survive. She’s exhausted by it all.

They part ways, but by noon her back aches and her stomach growls. She searches him out between autopsies, hungry for a body with blood flowing through its veins but forgetting about the suit and the sounds from last night, forgetting how he’s taken to standing just inches from her instead of across the room.

 _You okay, Scully?_ he asks a dozen times, not with his mouth but with his eyes, with the tender cock of his head each time he says her name. _I’m okay, I’m okay,_ she wants to yell, only really she’s not, because there’s a robe stuffed in her suitcase and dead women on cold slabs and a piece of him still inside her damn body. 

His tongue runs one too many times along his lip and she needs to excuse herself. It takes ten minutes in the 60 degree chill of the morgue for the flush to leave her cheeks. She’s slowly but surely losing control.

…

Back in her room that night, she digs in her bag, pulls out the sleeping pills she reserves for special occasions. Spending eight hours hot and bothered in a morgue qualifies as a special occasion she determines, downing two. Lying on her bed, she glances toward the adjoining door, considers locking it but knows damn well she’ll do nothing of the sort.

She closes her eyes, manages not to think of his mouth for a solid eight hours.

…

“A redhead,” he murmurs, just loudly enough for her to hear, next morning’s crime scene photos splayed across the station’s conference room table. She takes a deep breath, feels his hand briefly at her shoulder and remembers how it felt in that exact same spot but minus the wool blend blazer last week in a Sarasota motel room. She allows the thought to linger, then angrily shrugs him off, annoyed that she’ll never feel another touch of his without some tantalizing memory nudging its way through her brain.

Mindfuck indeed.

The details are grisly, and he fidgets behind her during the briefing, intensity radiating from his body in waves. He’s not going to leave her alone today, she can feel it, and that worries her, because a needy Mulder is her greatest weakness.

The meeting breaks but to her surprise, instead of hovering, he tells her he’s heading out with another officer and _will you have enough to keep you busy here?_ She nods, dumbfounded, maybe even a little hurt. As he grabs his jacket, she tries convincing herself it’s what she wanted anyway, wasn’t it?

Red hair, blue eyes, five foot and a smidge—it’s hard not to notice the similarities as she lifts the starched cotton sheet not ten minutes later. Maybe she _needed_ some hovering today, did he ever think of that? She’s contradicting herself and she knows it. The adjoining door between their rooms hasn’t cracked open after 10PM for three nights straight, and the implications of that weigh on her mind much more heavily than is appropriate while standing before a dead and mutilated body.

She wonders whether the victim had a husband, a boyfriend, a platonic colleague she fucked occasionally when the lights were off. There’s no wedding band on her finger, no significant scars on her body other than those left by her attacker. Scully fingers the back of her own neck, thinks about the numerous marks some forensic pathologist will find marring her own body one day. 

She’s usually good at maintaining a clinical detachment at work, but when she glances down to see her hand lying next to the victim’s, she needs to turn away; the two are exactly the same size.

It feels wrong dialing his number moments later, the same way packing that robe felt wrong, the same way slipping that piece of him inside herself last week felt wrong. It’s all wrong— everything these days— but she can’t stop, doesn’t want to.

“What’s up?” he answers, rushed. She scrambles in her head for an answer other than _I need you Mulder, I miss your hovering_.

“Just…,” she fumbles, “Just checking in, that’s all. I’m going to be a while here. You?”

“Busy, busy, busy,” he tells her, voices loud in the background. “Was that all?”

“Yeah, I’ll let you get back then,” she replies, feeling foolish, angry with herself for even calling in the first place. 

“Hey,” he stops her, voice suddenly too soft and intimate for her own good. “You okay, Scully?”

“I’m fine,” she clips quickly, disconnecting before hearing his response. She goes back to cutting, holds the woman’s heart in her hands and tries to keep from crying.

….

They meet back at the station that evening, surrounded by tired officers ready to get home—to their wives, to their TV dinners, just away from this god-awful case. The woman from the morgue was identified this afternoon, likely while Scully slid a scalpel beneath her skin: Lara Sutton, thirty-four years old, a single mother.

Mulder meets her eyes from across the room but she looks away. She feels his gaze though—intense, heavy—through the jumble of uniforms, across a table strewn with grisly photos and Styrofoam cups of half-drunk coffee. The police chief drones on … _need to mobilize forces tomorrow… attack every back alley, every hidden corner_ … 

Her eyes flick back across the room to find him still watching her. She focuses straight ahead and sets her jaw, tries to ignore the sensation of her nipples tightening against her bra. She doesn’t know how he does it—makes her both hate him and want him, all in the same breath.

He’s strangely quiet on the drive back to the motel, unnaturally so. It unnerves her. Mulder is rarely quiet, even when she asks him to be, and she didn’t ask it of him tonight. She’s quiet, too—tired from a day on her feet, tired from cutting through skin that should be pink with blood but instead is a dull, cold gray, tired from playing games with herself about how badly she does or doesn’t want the man sitting beside her.

There’s a tension in the air tonight, a _something_ brewing she can’t quite place her finger on.

That’s a lie. She knows exactly what’s brewing.

He’ll come tonight.

…

It’s late when they arrive back at the motel. By the time they part ways it’s 9:00, so they mumble goodnights outside their respective numbered doors. He seems taller in the shadows of the motel breezeway, broodier. Dangerous. Their doors swing simultaneously open and they disappear behind them.

She readies herself for bed, same as always—suit hung, shower taken. Nothing out of the ordinary, just another run-of-the-mill night on the road, she tells herself.

She sits on the bed in her towel and glances at the adjoining door. This isn’t just another run-of-the-mill night and she knows it.

She overthinks things, then overthinks them again. Lara Sutton has children at home begging for their mother; Dana Scully has a lacy robe in her suitcase begging to be worn. It’s disgusting that she’d even compare the two, disgusting that people are out there hurting and she’s obsessing over the state of her wardrobe in the safety of her motel room. She pulls out her menswear pajamas.

She lies in bed. The sheets grope at her body, like fingers, like hands, like a dark and broody partner who visits her at night. This motel’s linens leave a lot to be desired, she thinks stupidly. She tosses and turns, her skin over-sensitized, her body restless, _needy_. He won’t come, she tries convincing herself—things are normal, ordinary, same as they are on every out of town case. It’ll be a busy day tomorrow, best to get some sleep. There’s a muffled guffaw from the closet, pointy-tusked bastard.

She tries for twenty minutes more, thirty. She considers pulling out the sleeping pills again but knows that’s not an option. Not tonight.

It’s silent next door. Dead silent. What if he’s asleep? What if she misread things? What if she’s spent the last several days obsessing over this and he’s out getting a beer at the local bar? This is all a mistake, she tells herself for the hundredth time, the thousandth. 

Ten minutes more and she can’t do it anymore. She throws off the terrible, gropey motel sheets, throws off her terrible, boring menswear pajamas. Digging in her suitcase, she unearths the silky robe, needing control over _something_ here tonight, _anything_. She makes her way to the chair in the corner and sits, looks at everything in the darkened room _except_ the adjoining door, tells herself she’s sitting there because it’s comfortable, it’s _relaxing_.

It is not relaxing.

She lasts five minutes before she’s back up and pacing the room, sash tight around her waist and robe just as gropey against her naked skin as those damn hotel sheets she shed only moments ago. The lace plucks at her nipples, the satin slides its greedy hands across her back. She thinks of Lara Sutton, wonders whether she hugged her children the morning before she died, whether she owned a robe like this, whether she ever ached for someone so deeply she thought she’d break in half from the weight of it.

She sits back down on the bed, faces the adjoining door. It was easier a week ago, a month ago, when she had the luxury of being surprised by his visits. The _expectation_ of all this has close to ruined her.

She thinks back to the early days of their partnership, how secretly spellbound she was by him. She reveled in his madness back then, that thrilling moment of surprise each time he opened his mouth. Now though, oh she’s still spellbound by him—god is she— but it’s different. There’s no surprise to her fascination now—it’s simply a part of who they are; her enthrallment with her partner is ingrained in her bones.

She watches the door, tense, fingers fisted into the sheets at the edge of the mattress. _A piece of you’s inside me, Mulder_. 

This is a mistake, she tells herself again. 

The door handle turns. 

….

He slips inside silently, doesn’t notice her at first. 

When he sees her though… The way he stops, the way he grunts her name in surprise—chills run through her body.

Their eyes meet in the dark. _This is a mistake, this is a mistake_ , plays ad nauseum in her brain. She doesn’t give a shit.

If she thought he looked tall outside their motel doors a few hours ago, she was wrong. Even clad only in boxers, he’s a giant now, spellbinding and sullen, ten feet tall to her five foot two. Her pulse races. 

She wants this. She _needs_ it.

_Hover over me now, Mulder. Please. Hover over me until I can’t breathe._

She’s trembling. She’s desperate. She’s in love with a giant who can’t seem to love her unless it’s in a motel room while they both pretend it’s not happening.

She wants. Him. To fuck. Her.

Without thinking, she stands. But instead of walking over to him, instead of being the brave one and breaking this mindfuck of a cycle they seem to be in, instead of doing any of the sane things she could do right now, instead she turns around. She turns around and slowly crawls onto the edge of the bed on all fours, takes the stupid lacy robe and draws it over her bared rear to bunch around her waist. Then she dares to glance back over her shoulder.

“Fuck,” he exhales, “Holy fuck, Scully.” She closes her eyes, drops her head until her hair brushes against the sheets. There’s a madman on the loose in Detroit, Michigan and she’s here in her motel room, ass in the air begging to get fucked by her partner. She doesn’t know whether it’s the sexiest thing she’s ever done or the most pathetic.

He approaches. The insides of her thighs are sticky, slick. She can smell herself. 

“Is this how you want it?” he asks in a raspy voice. He sounds like the gravel from the parking lot outside their doors. He sounds like last week in Sarasota. He sounds like sex.

“Yes,” she whispers, barely audible, tucking her head to her chest. Her arms wobble beneath her.

His hands come down roughly on her hips and squeeze. Hard. She shudders. “Are you sure?”

“Please,” she chokes. She can’t keep from arching her back, can’t keep from begging. Can’t even breathe. This is what it’s all come down to, hasn’t it? Seven years of desire culminating with him at her back, not even looking each other in the eye. She’d scream if she weren’t biting her lip in order not to.

Without warning, he yanks her back, grinds his still-clothed erection against her rear. She groans. “Christ,” he grits out through clenched teeth, “Christ, Scully.” He hits her where she’s swollen and wet, and she could sob from the sweet relief of it. “Been thinking about…” He kneads the flesh of her rear, grinds himself against her deeply, almost reverently, “…thinking about this all week, about _you_.”

And she knows, she _knows_ how that feels. She’s thought about him for seven years straight—like this, and not like this, too. As a friend, a partner, a lover. But none of those are what _this_ is—this right here, what they’re doing right now. This is some sort of twisted in-between, where a piece of him is inside her, yet she’s never even really touched him. She hates it, she loves it, she just— _god_ —she just needs him inside her or she’ll die. 

“Do it,” she pleads, “Please, Mulder, just…” She presses back against him, needy, out-of-control.

His hands leave her hips and there’s the sound of fabric being shoved to his thighs, there’s the hot, thick length of him pressed against her ass. They groan simultaneously. _Fuck fuck fuck_ she hears him say desperately beneath his breath, and _now now now_ she answers desperately in her head. 

The sheets beneath her are crumpled, probably white but a muted gray in the dark. She fists them between her fingers, trembling. She feels him there, nudging, one hand gripping her ass while the other attempts to guide himself in. She’d help, but she’s shaking too hard, breathing too quickly, losing it losing it losing— he finds her entrance with a shove of his hips and she cries out, drops from her hands to her elbows against those not-white-not-gray-not-any-color-but-a-brilliant-blinding-haze-while-her-fbi-partner-of-seven-years-finally-finally-slips-inside-her-for-the-very-first-time sheets.

There’s no way to describe how he feels, no time to think about it either. As soon as he’s found his way, he’s pounding into her desperately, fingers digging painfully into her hipbones and her name a primal growl from his lips. She’s so wet she can hear herself. It’s disgustingly erotic. This whole thing is disgustingly erotic—the two of them, their relationship, the way they’ve taken love and screwed it around into _this._

“You’re so…,” he grunts, pelvis slapping against her ass, “so… FUCK, Scully, FUCK.” The lace from the robe flicks across her nipples with every thrust, until it’s almost painful, until everything is so deliciously overwhelming all she can think is _more oh god please more_. He’s splitting her open and she’s never felt this alive in her life.

She tries to participate, to grind back against him, to make this good for him, too, but she can’t keep up. He’s moving so quickly, so frantically, she finally gives up, falling further onto the mattress, opening her mouth against the sheets and letting her lips drag slack across them with each heave of his body against her. She allows the moans to spill out, the whimpers, the saliva she’s got no control over because this is so damn good. She decides she doesn’t care if this is all they’re willing to share with one another because maybe, _maybe_ it’s enough. She tries to work her mouth to tell him that, that it’s okay, all of it, whatever he’s willing to give she’ll accept.

But her mouth won’t work, especially when his hand is reaching around like that, when it’s fumbling beneath them both and landing itself on her clit, fingering her roughly and perfectly and exactly the way she’s imagined in her dreams, and his cock is there, too, scraping along every nerve ending it feels like she has and—

She comes with an agonized, animalistic cry, bucking against his fingers because it’s almost, _almost_ too much. She grinds back against him finally, spellbinding giant that he is, lets her body do what it wants to because her brain hasn’t been in control of any of this for weeks, for months, maybe even for years, and why start now. He holds her through it all, encourages her with words that aren’t even words—they’re sounds, primal and nonsensical, but she understands them anyway because it’s Mulder, it’s _Mulder_ who’s saying them.

Moments later it’s he who’s coming, with hard and frenzied thrusts, a glorious jumbled version of her name bursting from his mouth to land in a spray of spittle across her shoulder blades, his body falling finally heavy against her back. 

And just when she thinks it’s all over, when they’ve collapsed onto the bed and their panting breaths have slowed, when she’s closed her eyes and mentally prepared herself to go back to the way it was—lights off and no words and an elephant laughing maniacally at them from over in the closet—he surprises her, grabbing her aggressively by the shoulders and rolling her over.

“No,” he growls, face close and hovering above her ( _Hover over me now, Mulder. Please. Hover over me until I can’t breathe._ ) “We’re not pretending like this didn’t happen again, dammit. I can’t…I won’t keep doing that, Scully.”

She looks him in the eye and can’t take it, his intensity, his need to make everything all right even when she’s sure everything’s not all right at all.

“It’s fine, Mulder,” she pleads, _needing_ it to be fine, needing not to feel like just an obligation. She’s always been okay with this—with giving herself to him this way and not asking anything in return. Words stumble themselves from her mouth: _no need to feel obligated_ , _mutually beneficial_ , _doesn’t have to be anything it’s not_ , but he looks at her like she’s crazy—and maybe she is, maybe this is the straw that’s finally broken her back.

“Scully,” he stops her, fingers brushing through her hair, thumbs at her cheekbones. “Don’t you… Christ, don’t you understand? I _want_ this. I’ve wanted it— _you_ —for years. I never should have… You’re not an _obligation_ to me. You’re not just a stress-reliever, a fuck buddy, whatever awful term you may be thinking. I _love_ you, and want a chance to show you that—not just in the dark, not just on the road when a case gets hard, but all the time. Let me… let me love you with the lights on.”

There are tears in her eyes as he hovers above her, tears in his eyes, too. She allows his words to sink in. It’s hard to believe that it could all be this easy. Lips quivering, she takes in his face, his body, the delicious warm weight of it against her own. 

Her wonderful, frustrating giant of a partner.

“Okay,” she whispers with a shy smile, and before she’s even finished, his mouth is on hers, fingers clenched tightly in her hair. It’s the first time they’ve even really kissed, she realizes, his tongue finding its way into her mouth while she moans in surrender. 

It’s an aching, beautiful thing, his lips on hers, finally, after all they’ve been through—dead girls and monsters and a silly lacy robe. She tries to take it all in, to count his teeth and to taste his tongue, to memorize his groans, his grunts, that wonderfully desperate way he whispers her name. She tries, but in the end, all she can do is feel, lie back against those white-gray-whatever-they-are sheets and _feel_.

And minutes later, hours, who even knows, when they’re drowsy and kiss-drunk and lying spooned on her bed, she turns in his arms and she murmurs against his chest, “A piece of you’s inside me, Mulder.”

He chuckles at first, a low rumble that makes her head bounce against his chest, but then he turns to nuzzle at her temple, places a kiss there and then another. Very seriously, he tells her, “ _Every_ piece of me is inside you, Scully—you’ve owned me hook, line, and sinker from the very beginning.” She smiles, snuggles a little closer then slowly drifts off to sleep.

Neither of them notice the gentle closing of the door, the thick gray skin and the sharp white tusks as their unwanted travel companion makes his way out into the night, slipping from their lives, this time for good.


End file.
